by Bob Shaw
There was a lengthy period of near-silence—the street sounds were murmurous and remote, part of another existence—then Beaumont spoke in less assertive tones. "What brought you here anyway, Dallen? Why didn't you stay on the Big O where you belong?"
Responding to the change in the other man's attitude, Dallen said, "It's my job."
"Hammering down on folk who's only standing up for their rights? Great job, man."
"They haven't any right to steal Metagov supplies and equipment."
"They got to steal the stuff if they can't afford to pay off Madison City officers on the quiet. Be straight with yourself, Dallen. Do you really think it's right for Metagov to keep a whole city going … a whole city lying empty except for a population of frigging optical illusions … while we got people sick and hungry on the outside?"
Dallen shook his head, even though Beaumont could not see, impatient with old arguments. "There's no need for anybody to go sick or hungry."
"I know," Beaumont said bitterly. "Let ourselves be rounded up like cattle! Let ourselves be shipped off to the Big O and turned out to pasture … Well, some of us just won't do it, Dallen. We're the Independents."
"Independents who feel entitled to be supported." Dallen was deliberately supercilious. "That's a serious contradiction in terms, young Derek."
"We don't want to be supported. We made a contribution too, but nobody … We just want … We…" Overwhelmed by incoherence, Beaumont paused and his laboured breathing was easily audible through the partition.
"And all I want is that combination," Dallen said. "Your time's running out."
He made his voice hard and certain, consciously striking out against the ambivalence he usually felt when forced to think, about Earth's recent past. Cona, as a professional historian, had the sort of mind which could cope with vast areas of complexity, confusion and conflict, whereas he yearned for a dawn-time simplicity which was never forthcoming. In the early years of the migrations, for example, nobody had planned actually to abandon the cities of the home world and let them sink into decay. There had been too big an investment in time. Mankind's very soul lingered in the masonry of the great conurbations, and hundreds of them—from York to New York, Paris to Peking—had been designated as cultural shrines, places to which Earth's children would return from time to time and reaffirm their humanity.
But the thinking had been wrong, bound by outdated parameters.
There had once been an age in which romantics could see men as natural wanderers, compelled to voyage from one stellar beacon to the next until they ran out of space or time—but there were no stars in the night skies of Orbitsville. Generations had come and gone without ever having their spirits troubled by the sight of distant suns. Orbitsville provided all the lebensraum they and their descendants would ever need; Earth was remote and increasingly irrelevant, and there were better things to do with money than the propping up of reins for forgotten cities. Madison, former administration centre for the evacuation of seven states, was one of the very few museum cities to remain viable, and even there funding and time were growing desperately short.
The thought of dwindling reserves of time prompted. Dallen to look again at his watch. "I can't risk babysitting here any longer," he called out. "See you around!"
"You can't bluff me, Dallen."
"Wouldn't dream of trying." Dallen walked towards the front of the store, resisting the temptation to tread noisily on the dusty grey timbers of the floor. The slightest hint of overacting on his part was likely to strengthen Beaumont's resolve. As he dodged the insubstantial stalactites of cobwebs the conviction that he had made a mistake grew more intense and more unmanning. He decided to wait at the outer door for two minutes before dragging his prisoner out to safety, but new doubts had begun to gnaw at his confidence. What if Beaumont genuinely did not know the fuze combination or even the precise timer setting? What sort of justification could he give to others, to himself, if the bomb exploded and sent a blizzard of glass daggers through the pedestrians in 1990 Street?
On reaching the front door he leaned against the frame, pressing his forehead into his arm, and began the familiar exercise of catechising the stranger he had become. What are you doing here? How long will it be before you—personally and deliberately—kill one of these sad, Earth-limited gawks? Why don't you pack in the sad, Earth-limited little job and take Cona and Mikel back to Orbitsville where you all belong?
The last question was one which had confronted him with increasing frequency in recent months. It had never failed to produce feelings of anger and frustration, the helplessness which comes when a mind which likes answers is faced with the unanswerable, but all at once—standing there in the mouldered silence of the store—he realised that the difficulty lay within himself and always had done. The question was childishly simple, provided he faced up to and acknowledged the fact that he had made a mistake in coming to Earth. It was so easy. He—Garry Dallen, the man who was always right—had made a stupid mistake!
Aware that he was rushing psychological processes which could not be rushed, that he was bound to suffer reactions later, he posed the crucial question again and saw that it had become redundant. There was nothing under this or any other sun to prevent his taking his family home. They could be on their way within a week. Dallen, experiencing a sense of relief and release which was almost post-orgasmic, looked down at his hands and found they were trembling.
"Let's get the hell out of here," he whispered, turning towards the rear of the store.
"For Chris'sake, Dallen, come back!" The voice from the office enclosure was virtually unrecognisable, a high-pitched whine of panic. "This thing's set for 11.20! What time is it now?"
Dallen looked at his watch and saw there were four minutes in hand. At another time he would have walked slowly and silently back to the office, turning the screw on his prisoner to show him that life was easier on the right side of the law, but that kind of thinking now seemed petty. Earth-limited, was the term he had just invented. I don't want to be Earth-limited any longer.
He ran to the rear office, shouldered open the door and looked down at Beaumont, who was still unable to move. The silver obscenity of the bomb was projecting from his crotch. Suppressing a pang of shame, Dallen retrieved the cylinder and fingered the fuze combination rings.
"You're going to be bastardin' sorry about this, you bastard," Beaumont ground out, his eyes white crescents of hatred.
"My watch might be slow," Dallen said pointedly. "Do you want out of here, or would you rather stay and…?"
"Six-seven-nine-two-seven-nine."
"That must be a prime number." Dallen began aligning the digits with the datum mark. "Get it? Fuze—primer—prime?"
"Hurry up, for…"
"There we go!" Dallen withdrew the fuze and tossed it into a corner. "Thanks for your cooperation, Derek."
He left the office, walked along a short corridor to the rear of the premises and opened a heavy door whose hinges made snapping sounds as they broke bonds of rust. An unmarked car was waiting in the alley outside, its smooth haunches scattering oily needles of sunlight, and two young officers in uniform—Tandy and Ibbetson—were standing beside it. Dallen smiled as he saw the apprehension on their faces.
"Have a bomb," he said, slapping the cylinder into Ibbetson's palm. "It's okay—it's safe—and there's a character called Derek Beaumont to go with it. You'll find him resting inside, first door on the right."
"I wish you wouldn't do things like this," Ibbetson mumbled. His voice faded as he went through the door, turning his footballer's shoulders to facilitate entry, and lumbered along the corridor.
Vic Tandy, slate-jawed and meticulously neat, moved closer to Dallen. "Would you talk with Jim Mellor? He's going crazy back there trying to reach you."
"He always does. Every time I get into a pocket of bad reception he…" Dallen broke off as he noticed Tandy's expression, oddly wooden and reserved. "Anything wrong?"
"All I heard i
s Jim wants you to contact him." Avoiding Dallen's gaze, Tandy tried to by-pass him and enter the building.
"Don't try that sort of thing on me," Dallen snapped, gripping the other man's upper arm. "Out with it!"
Tandy, now looking embarrassed, said, "I … I think something might have happened to your wife and boy."
Dallen stepped back from him, bemusedly shaking his head, filled with a sense that his surroundings and the blue dome of atmosphere and the universe beyond were imploding upon him.
Chapter 4
On the butt of the gun there was a stud which had to be depressed and moved from one end of a U-shaped slot to the other. It had been designed that way to ensure that the weapon, a highly expensive piece of engineering, could never be decommissioned by accident. Mathieu ran the stud along its full course, causing the myriad circuits to adopt new and permanent neutral configurations, then he stripped the gun down to four basic parts and hid them in separate drawers of his desk.
The action made him feel safer, but not much. His original plan, now revealed to have been woefully inadequate, had not allowed for a still-functioning alarm system on Sublevel Three, and he could only speculate about other possible deficiencies. The gun had been rendered invisible to any detectors the police might bring in, but there was no guarantee that an existing monitor had not already tracked its course through the building and into his office. If that were the case he would know about it very soon.
Behave normally in the meantime, he told himself, then came a question which was almost unanswerable to one in his state of mind. What do normal people do when an alarm sounds? He pondered it for a moment, like a man confronted by a problem in alien logic, and hesitantly reached towards his communications panel. The solid image of Vik Costain, personal assistant to Mayor Bryceland, appeared at the projection focus. Costain, who was close to sixty, made a profession out of knowing all there was to know about the City Hall and those who worked there.
"What's going on?" Mathieu said. "What was the racket?"
"Give me a break, will you? I'm still trying to…" Costain tilted his near-hairless head, obviously listening to an important message, and nodded decisively—a sure sign he had no idea what to do next. "Call me later, Gerald."
"Don't forget to let me know if the building's on fire," Mathieu replied, breaking the connection. He breathed deeply and regularly for a minute, satisfied that he had put on a reasonable act, gone some distance towards covering his tracks, then he closed his eyes and saw Cona Dallen and her son falling … falling and folding … their eyes already bright and incurious … idiot eyes…
Mathieu leaped to his feet and walked around the perimeter of his office, suddenly unable to dredge enough oxygen from the air. He had made the circuit a second time, faster, before realising he was trying to outrace a part of himself, the part which acknowledged that he—Gerald Mathieu—was a murderer. No amount of sidestepping or playing with definitions was going to change that fact. Continuance of personality was the sole criterion, the only one which counted, and the personalities known as Cona Dallen and Mikel Dallen no longer existed. He had blasted them away in a storm of complex radiations which had returned two human brains to the tabula rasa condition of the newborn infant, and those personalities would never exist again, no matter what therapies were employed.
Garry Dallen will kill me! Mathieu abruptly stopped walking and pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, trying to come to terms with the new thought. There was little that was fanciful or melodramatic about it. Dallen was a big, powerfully built, handsome man who worked a little too hard at appearing casual, who was always a little too quick with the joke or pleasantry designed to put those about him at their ease. Mathieu, a gifted people-watcher, had privately sized him up as inflexible and intolerant, with the capacity to be ruthless in pursuit of what he believed to be right. He had always been afraid of Dallen, even when there was nothing more than well-concealed graft on his conscience—now he had a chilling conviction that Dallen would look straight into his soul, know him for what he was, and come after him like a remorseless machine.
"No more than you deserve," he said, addressing his image in a wall mirror he had had specially installed. The man he saw looked surprisingly relaxed and confident, like a Nordic tennis champion on holiday, giving no indication of criminality or of the hunger which was growing more insistent in him by the minute. The thought of felicitin caused Mathieu to slip a hand into his jacket and touch the gold pen clipped in the inner pocket. It was a functional writing instrument, but with a small adjustment it dispensed a magical ink. A one-centimetre line drawn on the tongue was enough to put right everything that was wrong in Mathieu's life, not only for the present but working in retrospect, right back to the time he had come from Orbitsville at the age of eight.
His father, Arthur Mathieu, had been a minor Metagov official who had followed the promotion trail to Earth and had lost his way in a maze of gin bottles and ill-starred departmental shuffles. The community of government workers in Madison City was small and close-knit, and the boy Gerald—humiliated by his father's failure-—had gone through school as a solitary stroller, barely achieving grades, dreaming of the day he would return to the Big O's delicately ribbed sky and up-curving horizons. Then, when Gerald was sixteen, his father had died in a ludicrous accident involving a hedge trimmer, and suddenly the way back had been open. His mother was returning, his younger sister was returning, but Mathieu had found he was afraid of the return journey and even more terrified of Orbitsville itself. He had claimed the right to an unbroken education and by sheer force of belated effort had built a successful career in Madison, achieving a position which no reasonable person would expect him to quit merely to return to his boyhood home.
Mathieu understood his own private strategy, however. And although one part of his mind assured him his timidity was of no consequence—another part, brooding and illogical, saw it a serious character defect, evidence of a void where there should have been the cornerstone of a personality. He had tried psychological judo, presenting his weaknesses as cute foibles, I've never had the slightest trace of will power—ask anybody who knows me. There is only one way to get rid of temptation—give in immediately. You can always trust me to let you down…
Then had come felicitin, bringer of the ultimate high. Felicitin, which could have been custom-designed by a master chemist for Mathieu's personal salvation, which made the user feel not only good, but right. Felicitin, at five thousand monits and more for an amount the size of a single teardrop.
For which he had become a thief.
For which he had become a murderer.
Mathieu drew the gold pen out of his pocket, clenched both hands around it and made as if to snap it in two. He stood that way for a full minute, changing his grip on the cylinder several times, trembling like a marksman afflicted with target-shyness, then his posture relaxed as he felt himself arrive at one of his rationalisations. There was no need to try kicking the habit. Dallen would be quick to ascertain the events leading to the annihilation of his family, to leap from motive and opportunity to half-intuitive identification. Soon after that Mathieu would be going to the prison colony—if Dallen let him get that far—and in prison one did not have to struggle to escape drug dependency. The cold turkey treatment was thrown in free with the uniform and the rehab tapes.
From beyond his door there came the sound of other doors slamming, excited voices, rapid footsteps. One thing which had not changed over the centuries was the essential dullness of most administrative jobs, and on a heavy summer's morning., with the outside world shimmering on the windows like a multicoloured dream, the sense of ennui in the corridors was almost tangible. Now something out of the ordinary had happened in the building and the word was going around. This was going to be a day to remember.
Mathieu slipped his pen back into his pocket, sat down at his desk and tried to plan the next hour. He decided, having made his for-the-record enquiry, to wait where he
was until someone requested his presence downstairs. Frank Bryceland, the mayor, was out of town for two days, so it was likely that Mathieu would be summoned as soon as Costain realised what had happened. As the minutes slowly filtered from future into past he felt mildly surprised at how long Costain was taking, then he began to appreciate the variance between his own informed viewpoint and those of other people in the building. An alarm had sounded without any immediately identifiable cause; a security check could be slow and tentative; and the condition of the woman and child lying on the emergency stair might take time to diagnose, especially as Luddite Specials were far from common by the end of the 23rd Century.
Prompted by impulse, Mathieu went to the window and looked down at the north side car park just as a police cruiser came slewing in from Burlington Avenue. As soon as it had stopped three men got out and ran towards the north lobby. Something gave an icy heave in Mathieu's stomach as he recognised the black-haired figure of Garry Dallen loping along with unconscious power, looking as though he could run clear through the wall of the building. Feeling cold and isolated, Mathieu returned to his desk and sat staring at his hands, waiting.
Perhaps five minutes had gone by before there was a chiming sound and Costain's head hovered before him. Errant flecks of light swarming like fireflies around the image showed the projector was losing its adjustments.
"Can you come down to the north lobby?" Costain sounded both nervous and guarded. "Right now?"
"What's the matter?"
"It looks like somebody has wiped Cona Dallen and her boy."